While aircraft design over the decades has narrowed in on a set of configurations that worked better than others, how aircraft are manufactured continues to evolve in a bid to lower cost as well as improve performance. Here are some of the landmark aircraft over those decades.

Helicopters have proved extraordinarily versatile and valuable across a wide range of missions, but even after the first brief pioneering flights their successful development involved decades of trial and error. Aviation Week takes a visual journey through that history.

The pioneer years of aviation included both successful and misguided efforts to make the number of safe landings approximate to the number of takeoffs. Here are some notable examples on both sides of that record.

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